


For Want of a Pear

by enthusiasmgirl



Series: Five Times Aziraphale Was Inconveniently Discorporated (And One Time He Wasn't) [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Discorporation (Good Omens), Gaslighting, Gen, Heaven, Paperwork, The Character Death is Just Discorporation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 08:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20597960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enthusiasmgirl/pseuds/enthusiasmgirl
Summary: Aziraphale only wanted to eat a pear. Instead, he ended up sitting in a pristine white room in Heaven waiting to fill out an awful lot of paperwork and wondering if it was worth it.





	For Want of a Pear

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a 5+1 series. It used to be multi-chapter, and I've since converted it to a series since each part was turning out to stand relatively alone.
> 
> It starts off kind of silly, but will likely get a bit angsty by the end, so you've been warned. But please be aware that the Character Death warning is only for inconvenient discorporations, and that he's fine by the end of it, I promise. I wouldn't do that.
> 
> This is also unbeta'd, so please feel free to point out any typos or minor errors you see in the comments and I am happy to correct them. Concrit is also always welcome.

**2620 BC**

He hadn't meant for it to happen. He really hadn't.

He understood completely that his corporeal form, while of the Earth, was still to be considered celestial, a temple to be worshipped and cared for with love and devotion. And he had done so for more than 2000 years. Not a bruise or scratch on it in all that time, he would swear. Hard to do among humans, who could be vicious and violent when they wanted to be, and in a world of other beasts. Of natural disasters, of vast scorching deserts and vast snow-swept tundras.

But Aziraphale loved his body. Had grown comfortable in it, familiar with it in all of its minor imperfections and individual details. He took great care to clean it, to tend to it when it needed it, to keep it from harm.

And yet here he was. Discorporated climbing a tree, of all things. One moment he was reaching out for a particularly juicy looking pear, barely registering the crack of the branch as it fell out from under him. The next moment it was over. It wasn't even as though he was up that high. He supposed he must have just landed the wrong way.

He rubbed his neck even though there was no pain. Just a phantom twinge at the thought of it.

_Here_ was a room, pristine and white as all of Heaven was. Four walls and a door, but it hadn't opened yet. No furniture. Just steel walls and tile floors, gleaming as brightly as starlight. How long had it been? Aziraphale didn't know. Hours? Months? Years? Why was he even still thinking in human timeframes in Heaven? Habit, he supposed.

He was alone. He asked himself once, ten times, a hundred times if it was right for him to simply open the door and yell a timid "Hello, anybody there?" into whatever room was on the other side. He paced, and tore in futility at his no longer in existence hair, until finally, at long last, he did.

"Oh!" came the surprised and displeased shout from the clerk sitting at the desk. "Where did you come from?"

"Earth?" Aziraphale said softly, confused.

"Have you been reassigned, then?" the clerk asked, her tone all business as she continued to tap at transparent screens around herself while talking to him. Sloth was a sin after all. There was work to be done.

"No, I'm afraid I was rather inconveniently..." Aziraphale started to explain.

"Name?" she interrupted. He gave it to her.

"You don't seem to have been reassigned!" she said with a tap tap tap. "Our records have you still on Earth. The African continent. What are you doing here?"

"Well that's the thing, you see. I'm..." he again tried to say.

"You were assigned a body," she said.

"Yes, I was, that's..." he said, unheard.

"Did you discorporate it?" she asked.

"Well, technically I didn't," he continued. "The ground did."

She grunted and looked down her nose at him as though she were his mother and had just caught him in the middle of a rather carnal act of self-love and was very, very disappointed in him, a look that brooked no forgiveness. He could only shrug and lower his head in shame at it.

When he raised his head again, he found a clipboard being thrust towards him. It could barely support the weight of the forms. So many forms. He took them gingerly and took a seat in a nearby chair, also white and hard and gleaming of starlight. It only took him a moment to realize they wouldn't do.

"I'm sorry, but..." She looked up and the glare alone cut him off. Finally, he worked up the courage to continue. "These forms are for a new body?" he asked. "A different body?"

"Yes," she said, and went back to her tap tap tapping.

"Well, but... but I'm afraid I'm rather attached to the original one," he told her, and immediately regretted it.

"Attached?" she asked, pronouncing the adjective somehow like a curse.

"Yes," he said, "but not..." he tried to come up with something to say that wouldn't be dismissed. "... not attached in the sense of what I personally desire or preference. Attached in the sense of the humans who know me on Earth preferring it. And other... contacts." He thought of the demon Crawly at that, their few brief meetings, and it made something inside of him ache. He hadn't seen him since the Flood, but still. It wouldn't do to be unrecognizable. "That specific body aids greatly in my good works," he told her.

The stare he received back from the clerk was inscrutable. But eventually she gave him a nod, and when he looked down the pile of forms was suddenly twice as high. The clipboard was doing a miraculous job. Once again, though, he knew immediately that it wouldn't do.

"Sorry to bother you again..." he said, and her eyes snapped up to meet his in a way that made him wonder if perhaps everyone in Heaven really was on his side after all. "The specifications? So many measurements and requirements. I'm afraid I don't remember them all. I hadn't realized I was supposed to take note of my sandal size or head diameter or nose length. And it has been a long time since it was issued..." They stared at each other for a long moment. "Is there any way that you could check... I mean, if you could, that would be..." He briefly felt as though even here he could hear his phantom heart beating out of its chest in panic and despair as he wondered if she would help him.

"Yes, of course," she finally said, with a professional smile that didn't reach anywhere near her eyes. "Take a seat." Tap tap tap again.

By the time he finally got his body back and found himself laying in the desert sand under what once was the site of a pear tree, 146 years had passed on Earth. The Great Pyramid of Giza had been erected. The mammoths were extinct. And he still really craved that pear.

Later, he would learn that they gave him indigestion now. Required a miracle to eat without a bit of pain and discomfort. He wondered if that was the clerk's revenge. But no, angels weren't capable of the sin of wrath. Were they?

He vowed never to be discorporated again.


End file.
